The roles of a therapist and a research interviewer have different goals, but both involve personal conversations. And both challenge us to think about how we use our lived experience to facilitate the conversation, how it may affect what is said to us and how we interpret that.

The 30th of November saw the first of what we will hope will be a series of methods workshops. It brought together over 70 researchers to discuss how to integrate ‘lived experience expertise in mental health research teams’. The event was massively oversubscribed and if the fact that we had to cut short discussions before we were physically kicked out of the venue is any guide, it succeeded in its aim of stimulating debate and the sharing of ideas.

Richard Currie is a researcher who is working with McPin on a number of projects that make use of both his research skills and his expertise from experience. In this brief video produced for our PPI in research week he talks with Rose about how he does this.

In this blog Rajvi reflects on the nature of the ‘peer’ in peer research. It is the latest in a series of personal reflections by McPin researchers on the use of lived experience of mental health problems in research published as part of our week on Patient and Public Involvement in Research.

Before Laura left the McPin Foundation in the summer to begin a PhD she wrote this blog exploring some of the issues about how we use our lived experience of mental health problems as researchers, and the labels we use as an organisation.

Researchers at Kings College London have just produced an interesting paper, published Feb 2016. It is available online, and can be easily accessed. It looks at the ease of reading participant information sheets over a 10 year period – June 2003 to October 2013.

Recently, we decided to take an audit across three separate projects to see how participants responded to our questions about their preferences for support. We decided to present what they told us as an infographic. We would love for you to tell us what you think of this approach – do you think that asking participants for their support preferences as part of the research recruitment process is helpful? Do you have any concerns ? Let us know your thoughts.

Our first ever public event was held on 8th October 2015 at the Jerwood Space. This was a chance to bring people with different expertise together to consider the role of the RCT (Randomised Control Trial) in mental health research design. It was also the launch of our Talking Point series of papers – a group of papers written by survivor / service user researchers on under discussed topics. Our launched paper by Alison Faulkner has a title that speaks for itself: “RCTs: the straitjacket of mental health research?

We had our first public event and the launch of our Talking Point series on Thursday 8th October 2015 at Jerwood Space in Southwark. We looked at the role of the Randomised Control Trials in mental health research with the help of Professor Sonia Johnson from University College London and Dr Steve Gillard from St George's University of London. Alison Faulkner, survivor researcher and trainer provided an overview of her Talking Point paper and we hosted a discussion. We also had a live twitter discussion during the event: #RCTDebate.

A crucial factor in making a piece of research successful or not is participant engagement. Do people want to take part and can you keep them engaged for follow-up if that is required? But very little research has been carried out of participant experiences of what’s involved in “taking part in research” and why people do.